BOOK: Mariana Armond Dias PAES. Esclavos y tierras entre posesión y títulos La construcción social del derecho de propiedad en Brasil (siglo XIX). Global Perspectives on Legal History 17. (Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory 2021). ISBN 978-3-944773-32-2. EUR 18

 

(Source: https://www.lhlt.mpg.de/publications/gplh-17?c=1935773)

The book examines the social construction of legal relations between people and things in Brazil between the 1830s and 1890s. To this end, the research focuses on 74 legal proceedings of the Court of Appeals of Rio de Janeiro discussing dominion and possession over slaves and land. The first chapter assesses the contours that the legal category of possession acquired in 19th-century Brazil. It analyzes the role of social recognition in the configuration of situations of possession. This chapter also describes how interpretations of theories of possession delegitimized acts of land usage employed by certain groups – namely: indigenous and agregados – as possessory acts. The second chapter analyzes the debates over domain titles and the process of document production undertaken by parties in legal proceedings. It also highlights the role of judicial demarcations in this process of production and shows how courts often disregarded titles issued by married women. The chapter closes with a discussion of the new configurations that debates over titles acquired in the last decades of the century. The third chapter focuses on cases of illegal and irregular acquisitions of slaves and land. The detailed analyses of the court cases presented in the book show that during the 19th century the construction of property rights in Brazil built upon the pre-existing structures of ius commune, whose categories were re-signified.

Índice

1		Introducción: sobre océanos y cocinas
		Capítulo I
19		Plantar mangos y matar indios: la cotidianeidad de la posesión
		Capítulo II
73		Océano de papeles: producir títulos, crear derechos
		Capítulo III
119		Legalidad en construcción: adquisiciones irregulares, títulos y posesión
67		Conclusión
171		Fuentes y bibliografía
195		About the Author

Mariana Dias Paes is Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt am Main) as well as at the «Beyond Slavery and Freedom» Cluster of Excellence (Bonn). She holds a master’s degree and a PhD from the University of São Paulo. In recent years her research has focused on law, slavery, dependency relations and ownership in Brazil and Angola during the nineteenth century. She is working on a book project on dependency relations in the South Atlantic between the 1780s and 1910s. She also coordinates the «Global Legal History on the Ground» project, which focuses on the in-depth analyses of court cases processed in African jurisdictions